Blacks And Whites example essay topic
Darren, the eldest, flies in from America, where he is a successful journalist, still choked with anger at his father and already on his third wife. Shirley has been left a wealthy widow by her Ghanaian husband – a marriage that caused almost as much familial strife as her current relationship with Leroy, a black social worker – but swaddled in cashmere and silks, she bears a sadness all her own. As a teenager, Shirley sensed a sexual sting in her father's punches, and this has taken root in Dirk, the skin-headed baby of the family. Brutalized and repressed, he desperately seeks acceptance as well as scapegoats in the company of loutish BNP-types. By the end of the novel, Dirk's inarticulate hatred of ' coloureds' will have coupled with his latent homosexuality to bloody effect, spurring Alfred to perform one final, redemptive act of duty. The White Family is a worthwhile novel, but Gee's skilful structure and tender, precise prose are undermined by riffs on pop psychology: as Alfred realises that the ' enemy' is no more than a bunch of ' giant teenagers', his eyes are opened to their exoticism and the ' gleaming black' of their skin.
Gee is unflinching in her exploration of the causes and consequences of racism, but too often she delves beneath the skin of her archetypes to come up with near stereotypes, and for all that it aims at up-to-the-minute, the book remains curiously, namely dated. As White Teeth, that other multi-cultural Brent novel showed, today's racial landscape is coloured less in blacks and whites than myriad shades of grey.